> In the same sense that any object that can potentially kill someone (hint: everything) is a weapon. Which is technically correct but a useless observation.
It's not useless; the damage that can be caused varies by degree between things. Then you have to look at two cases - suitability for object to be used as a weapon, and the damage it can cause on accident. Unlike knives or hammers, both those factors are very high for cars.
The fact how dangerous cars is is very much underappreciated by people in general, as evidenced by the number of morons on the road. We already lose hundreds of people daily in the US alone because of this; now we're trying to add another class of drivers into the mix - algorithms written by greedy optimizers caring primarily for short-term profit and being first to market. This should give us some pause.
I'm not saying this technology is not possible or not wonderful, but I think the current ecology of self-driving efforts is unhealthy. We have a for-profit race by companies, many of which can't be trusted with getting software right, and most (all?) of them pursuing self-driving capabilities by means of half-understood brute-force black boxes the neural networks are.
It's not useless; the damage that can be caused varies by degree between things. Then you have to look at two cases - suitability for object to be used as a weapon, and the damage it can cause on accident. Unlike knives or hammers, both those factors are very high for cars.
The fact how dangerous cars is is very much underappreciated by people in general, as evidenced by the number of morons on the road. We already lose hundreds of people daily in the US alone because of this; now we're trying to add another class of drivers into the mix - algorithms written by greedy optimizers caring primarily for short-term profit and being first to market. This should give us some pause.
I'm not saying this technology is not possible or not wonderful, but I think the current ecology of self-driving efforts is unhealthy. We have a for-profit race by companies, many of which can't be trusted with getting software right, and most (all?) of them pursuing self-driving capabilities by means of half-understood brute-force black boxes the neural networks are.